Pamela MacFarlane was born in Dunedin, NZ and completed a Master's degree in Zoology at the University of Otago in the 1940s. During part of this period she also studied part-time at the Dunedin School of Art. In 1949 she worked at the University of Western Australia preparing illustrations for publications by Professor H Waring. That year she married physiologist Victor MacFarlane. In the early 1950s, when he was Professor of Physiology at the University of Queensland, she studied at the Brisbane School of Art; in 1951-2 and 1958 she undertook training at the Art Students' League in New York. In 1959 the MacFarlanes moved to Canberra, Victor having been appointed a Professorial Fellow under John Eccles at the John Curtin School of Medical Research. In 1964, when Victor accepted a position at Adelaide's Waite Institute, the family moved to Crafers in the Adelaide Hills, where much of MacFarlane's work was to be destroyed in the bush fires of 1980. She held about 15 solo exhibitions in Dunedin, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Canberra, and participated in many group shows. She is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, the state galleries of South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania and University collections in Brisbane and Canberra. Amongst her works at the ANU is Uroboros (1963), a large painting commissioned for the Junior Common Room of Bruce Hall.
